When it comes to voter reaction to politicians who overstep personal and sexual lines of decorum, the rules for penalizing, forgiving and ignoring are difficult to pin down.

Perhaps it's just that other officeholders have higher thresholds for embarrassment.

On one end of the spectrum is John Edwards using political contributions to pay off the mistress who he took up with while his wife battled cancer (criminal, reprehensible and unforgivable). On the other is Jimmy Carter admitting that he looked at women other than his wife with lust in his heart (harmless, silly and not worth penalizing). In between, there is a sizable gray area in which our political leaders navigate an amorphous and constantly shifting series of legal, moral and ethical crosscurrents. For those who occupy the space between the extremes represented by Mr. Edwards and Mr. Carter, for the Clintons and the Gingriches, the Vitters and the Spitzers and the Sanfords, the likelihood of survival seems to be based primarily on the individual’s willingness to persevere.

Those candidates and officeholders with higher thresholds for embarrassment soon realize that the voters’ attention span for non-criminal behavior is phenomenally short, and if you can stick it out through the first few rounds of outrage and ridicule, you can probably live to pontificate another day. Bill Clinton is now a respected public statesman, David Vitter still serves in the Senate and Eliot Spitzer reaches millions of viewers each night with a well-paid cable television platform. Others, like Anthony Weiner, decide that the public humiliation and personal toll aren’t worth it. They go home, and either seek help for the weaknesses that drove them to their transgressions or simply nurse their grudges and resentments in private.

Representative Weiner may have been able to hold onto his Congressional seat had he chosen to, although he was not helped by the slow drip-drip-drip of new photos and accusations that would have fueled this story for the foreseeable future. Or maybe he just decided that, with a new wife and baby on the way, putting his life back together was more important than being on television and running for mayor.

From this point forward, most of us will not devote the emotional energy to either forgive or penalize Anthony Weiner. In all likelihood, we will first ignore him and then quickly forget him.